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>> Hi, I'm Justin Yu for CNET.com, and this is the HP Compaq Presario SR5610F PC. So the SR systems are Compaq's low cost, bare bones desktops, designed to stretch your dollar pretty much as far as it can go. And like most PCs in this category, you can see that the chassis is pretty yawn worthy. The front has this odd Pacman shaped cutout with the dual layer DVD drive up top, and space for an IDE loading hard drive below it. And at the bottom you've got two USB 2.0 ports, and a couple standard audio jacks. But we're disappointed that Compaq decided not to include a front mounted media card reader. Yeah we get it, this is a budget PC, but come on. You're really gonna actually make us use our digital camera's USB cord? That's annoying. Well at least they make up for it with a pretty decent set of internal components. It does come with a 2.5 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 dual core CPU, three gigs of RAM, an nVidia graphics chip built into the motherboard, a 320 gigabyte hard drive, and 32 bit Windows Vista home premium. But unfortunately, the inside doesn't really leave much for components. Taking a look inside, you'll see that both DIMM slots are actually filled with a couple of memory sticks. And there are no available SATA ports either. So if you plan on using more memory in the future in the system, you'll be forced to sacrifice at least one gig of RAM. Which leads us to our buying recommendation. So this PC is actually a pretty decent deal for the money. You get a worthy set of components for the price. But if you're really looking for a bargain, and your budget isn't completely locked down, we actually recommend saving a little bit more for a PC that'll give you more up front. For example, we put the Compaq Presario up against one of our favorite slim line systems, the Acer Aspire X3200, and as expected, it just couldn't keep up with the Acer's increased memory, and faster processor. So I'm Justin Yu, and this is the HP Compaq Presario SR5610F desktop computer.
